Hunt Slonem Bunnies Wallpaper

I saw this wallpaper in a powder room while taking the Houston Heights Home Tour last Sunday . This pattern was wildly popular about 10 years ago.
Imagine squeezing under that console sink with metal legs to place the wallpaper under there.

Another shot, showing a little more of the fir down / soffit over the sink .
According to Wikipedia , the designer, Hunt Slonem , started developing his obsession with all things bunny in the early 1980’s . He’s produced lots of different incarnations, and they’ve been used in wallpaper , fabric , artwork , kitchenware , decorative items , and everything in between.

Such a fun pattern. “And they breed like – rabbits!” This wallpaper is notoriously difficult to install . More on that in a future post.

Geometric Trellis in a Garden Oaks Attic Conversion Master Suite

I attended the Garden Oaks Home Tour yesterday, and walked up the stairs to the master suite, all the while thinking, “Something about this feels familiar.” When I got into the master bathroom, I got it – I had hung the wallpaper about two years ago!

What’s cool is, the wife had had the bathroom remodeled as a surprise gift for her hubby while he was overseas. Well, yesterday he was there, so I got to meet him. He said he positively loved the new bathroom.

Metallic Ink Causing Curled Seams – Revisited

A year and a half ago I hung this wallpaper in a powder room. https://wallpaperlady.wordpress.com/2016/10/02/9056/ I complained then about how the metallic ink caused the seams to curl, just a tad, everywhere the ink crossed a seam. I was hoping that once the paper was good and dry, the seams would lie down flat.

Well, I was back at the home today because it was on the Heights Home Tour. I was disappointed to see that the ink was still curled at the seams. With the way the sconces threw light on it, I thought it was very noticeable.

Of course, everyone else was looking at the beautiful pattern and the lovely room. Still, I wish Schumacher (and all manufacturers) would pay more attention to how their products perform in people’s homes.

My Wallpaper on Upcoming Local Home Tours

Are you a Home Tour Junkie? I am! I attend all the home tours I can in the Houston area. This year I am thrilled to say that two of the homes where I hung wallpaper will be on the Heights Home Tour in April. And another home I worked in will be on the Woodland Heights Home Tour in March. Two homes were pulled together by interior designers – Stacie Cokinos in the Woodland Heights and Rachel Goetz in the Heights.

As a side note, a home on the Good Brick tour last year featured a room I hung wallpaper in, and a few years back some of my work was shown on the Garden Oaks Home Tour.

Forget the past stuff – come on out to the Heights and the Woodland Height Home Tours and see some lovely homes, some cutting edge decorating, and some really craftsmanly-hung wallpaper!

Wild, Crazy, Colorful, Fun – A Bold Step for a Heights Powder Room

I hung this in the powder room of a beautifully renovated and modernized 1912 Spanish-style home in the Houston Heights. The homeowners love color. Unfortunately, the contractor left everything white and washed out. See first photo.

Never fear! Wallpaper came to the rescue – and in a BIG WAY! This super bold and mega colorful “Expanded Floral” pattern by Anthropologie ramped up the Wow Factor in their powder room.

This home will be on the Historic Heights Home Tour this spring. Come on by and see it!

Wallpaper on the Azalea Trail Home Tour, 2017, pt II

I attended the Azalea Trail Home Tour yesterday, which took me to four homes in the rather exclusive neighborhood of River Oaks (Houston). As always, I was scrutinizing the wallpaper.

One traditional style home had a very classic design of wallpaper (sort of a damask) in the dining room. Ever since I attended a Wallcovering Installers Association convention seminar years ago on “balancing” wallpaper patterns, I have been obsessed with the concept. This means that you position a dominant feature of the pattern so that it is centered on the wall. (Do a Search here to see some of my previous posts.) Normally, you can do this once in a room. Thereafter, the pattern has to fall on subsequent walls as it comes off the roll.

But in this dining room, there were about three walls that had the pattern centered. It looked wonderful, because the design was centered on a main focal wall between two windows, and again on an adjacent wall behind the buffet, an then on another wall that was highly visible.

Now, how can this happen?

I really studied the room. And I realized that all the draperies in the room reached way above the windows to the ceiling. And the drapery fabric and hardware pretty much filled up the entire space over the windows. Meaning that, the drapes would hide anything that was above the windows.

Meaning that, if the paperhanger chose, he could place the pattern as he wanted on the walls, and then mis-match the wallpaper pattern over the windows, knowing that it would be hidden from view. Then he could move on to the next section of wall and place the pattern as he wanted.

This trick worked nicely in this room, because the wallpaper design and color, as well as the draperies and hardware were all amenable.

It also took collaboration from the very planning stages, between the interior designer and the wallpaper installer, and also including input from the drapery lady and the hardware installer.

Wallpaper on the Heights Home Tour

I attended the Heights Home Tour yesterday, which showcased six homes. My favorite was a new home built in a traditional style – meaning, nice decorative woodwork, granite countertops, hardwood floors, tile in bathrooms, no mid-century modern looks (which were popular in many of the other homes). And this home happened to be part of the Gallery Furniture family. And, yes, all the furniture in it came from Gallery Furniture.

Another thing I loved about this home is that it had fair amount of wallpaper in it, all very nicely hung. There was a cute pen-and-ink drawing of dogs hanging in the back entry hall. There was a beautiful silver cork with a white leaf pattern stenciled on it in the master bathroom and potty. Another bathroom had a soft grey wallpaper, the laundry room had a paper that looked textured from a distance but actually wasn’t, another room had a patterned grasscloth, and, finally, in the “man cave” in the garage apartment, there was a fine grasscloth over all the walls. I was impressed that this grasscloth did not display the color variations (shading and paneling) that is common, so it had a very nice, uniform, textured look.

Of course, hundreds of tour-goers saw those rooms and how lovely they are, and will surely be clamoring for wallpaper in their own homes. 🙂

Azalea Trail Home Tour – Beautiful Hand-Painted Silk Mural

I took the annual home tour in River Oaks (“one of the five most expensive neighborhoods in the country” according to something I read once). Most of the homes there are very classic and traditional, so wallpaper us often used.

One home had a gorgeous mural in the dining room. It was a hand-painted scene on silk, by the De Gournay company. These murals are usually custom made to fit the room, so little pattern is lost trimming at the floor and ceiling, or going around doors and windows. The paints and colors are just beautiful. You can plainly see that they are painted by hand.

Even if you know nothing about wallpaper, it’s easy to spot the quality and purity of these hand-painted murals.

Wallpaper on the East Montrose Home Tour

Yesterday was my neighborhood’s Home Tour – our most successful ever, with an estimated 500 people attending.

One of the homes started as a 1920’s bungalow, and was taken down to the studs and redone, with a second story added. While removing the old walls down to the shiplapped wood, they uncovered the original wallpaper. As I have written about previously, this paper is gorgeous, IMO, with beautiful inks and inimitable patterns.

The homeowners saved a scrap of the paper from one of the rooms, had it cut into the shape of a cross, and then mounted it on a matt and framed it; it was hanging in the office/den. I think this is brilliant way to showcase an important part of the original home, without having it dominate or clash with the decor of the new home (which was relatively modern).

Norhill Home Tour Today – Cool Use of Vintage Wallpaper

I love home tours and go on as many as I can. (Eastwood is coming up next weekend – LOVE that neighborhood!)

Today was the Norhill tour, a pocket of the Heights just north of (and similar to) the Woodland Heights. I was surprised that NONE of the homes had wallpaper. Most of the homes were styled fairly true to their 1920’s roots (with updates for modern living, of course), and back then, EVERY room in EVERY house was papered. But all these homeowners opted to paint their spaces, instead.

However, there was one really clever use of old wallpaper that was uncovered during renovation of one of the homes. These vintage patterns are so pretty, and the colors hold up so well, they are just gorgeous. (I have a collection of all I can get my hands on.) Often, homeowners will frame thes scraps of paper and hang them in a room or hallway in the house.

But one homeowner took this idea a step further – She cut the old wallpaper scraps into the shape of butterflies, making sure to get as much of the pattern and color as possible. Then she took some of the old cheesecloth that was originally used to line the old ship-lapped wood walls to provide a base for the wallpaper, in the days before Sheetrock. She affixed the butterflies in an airy arrangement on the cheesecloth, and placed all of it between two sheets of glass, and finished with a simple wooden frame.

Just fabulous! I loved this idea, and so pretty hanging on the wall.